Hierarchical data structures that have many nodes can present rendering problems in how to present the data efficiently with many different web browsers. In data sets have 1000's to 10000 of nodes the ability to render the data can be limited without using rendering tools. However the rendering tools may not be available on all platforms resulting in performance issues. In large organizations each employee may be defined as a node. In the rendering of an organizational chart the employees can be arranged hierarchically.
Browsers were not designed to do animations on. For example, unlike graphical libraries, browsers don't give programmers things like “back buffers”, “transformation pipelines” or direct access to the “GPU”. In a browser, whenever you make a change to an element programmatically those changes are immediately applied on the screen and that is not very efficient when you need to make lots of changes on each individual frame of animation. The very concept of “frames of animation” is something not typically supported by browsers.
Rendering lots of elements in a web page can be very challenging as the increasing number of elements decreases performance. The way a browser structures elements on a page is very powerful and flexible. Both the Document Object Model (DOM) and Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) trees allow graphical designers to create very rich and stunning looking web pages. However, that flexibility and power comes at the cost of less than optimal performance. The more elements are displayed in a web page, the more this problem is noticeable. This means that creating a large org tree to go together with a large application like ours did represent a big challenge in terms of the number of visual elements that need to be displayed. New developments in web technology like HyperText Markup Language (HTML) 5 supports such ability however a requirement to support older browsers by an application removes the ability to leverage newer technologies.
Accordingly, improved systems and methods that enable effective rendering of large hierarchical data structures across platforms remains highly desirable.
It will be noted that throughout the appended drawings, like features are identified by like reference numerals.